East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

Send us Fan Mail  Former Texas House Representative Glen Maxey was born near a refinery in Baytown, Texas, in 1952. His first job was working in a traveling rodeo and his first serious foray into politics was as a student at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, where he led the charge to allow alcohol to be sold in that formerly dry county. Although he was already a known quantity in the Te...

Send us Fan Mail Amanda Metivier is the director of the Alaska Child Welfare Academy at UAA and is a board member and co-founder of Facing Foster Care in Alaska. She and her husband are foster parents who have provided homes for many youth over the past 15 years – many of them teenagers since both Amanda and her husband were foster youth themselves and know the difficulty that older children face...

Send us Fan Mail Keeley Olson has been the executive director of STAR since 2016. She has spent all of  her adult life working with the survivors  of sexual assault – from her college days in Montana through her time at STAR which began in Anchorage in 2007. STAR was founded in 1978 to respond to the needs of survivors of sexual assault. It also provides prevention and education programs to school...

Send us Fan Mail Colleen Mondor is a freelance investigative journalist who lives part-time in Alaska. She is a pilot and primarily writes about aviation safety. After running dispatch operations for four years at a Fairbanks-based commuter and charter airline, she wrote a memoir largely based on that experience, The Map of my Dead Pilots: The dangerous game of flying in Alaska.   In 2020, she pub...

Send us Fan Mail Today’s episode is a little bit different.  I held an Alaska house district 20 constituent town hall on Zoom regarding renters' rights. According to Alaska Economic Trends magazine, the average rent in Anchorage went up by 14.2% from 2021 to 2022, and then rose an additional 5% on top of that this year. The median rent in Anchorage is $1,532 a month. Folks fear they may lose...

Send us Fan Mail North Anchorage Assembly Member Daniel Volland was born and raised in Washington State, and began coming to Alaska regularly in 2016 to do remote work as an optometrist. After relocating permanently to Anchorage in 2019, he became very active very quickly in local politics and successfully ran for the newly established 12th seat on the Anchorage Assembly in the summer of 2022. Tod...

Send us Fan Mail The Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit (MMWIG2S) Alaska Working Group was founded by today's guests Kendra Kloster and Dr. Charlene Aqpik Apok (who will be referred to by her Inupiaq name Aqpik throughout today’s interview). The MMWIG2S Alaska Working Group is an Indigenous-led consortium that is supported by the partner organizations: Alaska Native Wom...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Dayna DeFeo is the director of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research (CAEPR) and a research assistant professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Dr. DeFeo’s primary research interests include college and postsecondary transitions, particularly in career and technical fields for underrepresented population...

Send us Fan Mail In honor of Filipino American History Month our guests are two professors from the University of Alaska Anchorage: Drs. EJR David and Gabriel Garcia. This past session House Bill 23 sponsored by Representative Genevieve Mina passed the Alaska legislature unanimously and was signed into law by Governor Dunleavy. This bill makes October officially Filipino American History Month. So...

Send us Fan Mail David Ramseur has been a major figure in Alaska politics for over 30 years. He served as press secretary, communications director, chief of staff, and foreign policy advisor to Alaska Governors Steve Cowper and Tony Knowles and to Anchorage Mayor and U.S. Senator Mark Begich. Today we are discussing Ramseur’s 2017 book Melting the Ice Curtain which tells the story of the courage a...

Send us Fan Mail Alaska House Minority Leader Calvin Schrage was born and raised in Anchorage. He chose not to follow his father into firefighting unlike his younger brothers. At 32, he is one of the youngest members in the Alaska legislature, and the youngest by far serving in a leadership position. We discuss why he didn’t become a firefighter, how he ended up representing the district he grew u...

Send us Fan Mail Bob Loeffler is a professor at UAA’s Institute of Social And Economic Research (ISER), where he teaches courses on the mining industry as well as natural resource policy and public land management. Before ISER, he worked for Alaska’s department of natural Resources initially in 1996 as coordinator for the permitting of large mines, and for seven years as the Director of the Divisi...

Send us Fan Mail  Alaska State Senate President Gary Stevens has been working on a play about US Senator Ted Stevens for almost a decade. That play Uncle Ted premiered at Cyrano’s theater in Anchorage on Friday, Sept. 29, 2023. I was at opening night, and we discuss the play and Gary’s relationship with Senator Ted Stevens as well as Ted’s oldest son Senator Ben Stevens: the three Senator Stevens’...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Travis Hedwig is the assistant dean of the division of population health sciences at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is co-editor of a forthcoming book entitled Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy in the Urban North . The book brings together leading scholars from Alaska, the Canadian north, and Greenland who examine the factors contributing to our housing and hom...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Mike Jones , an economist at UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), has focused much of his research on food security and food transportation in Alaska. He is a member of the legislature’s food strategy task force where he has served on the infrastructure and transport subcommittee. Born and raised in northern Florida, he earned a BS in Food and Resource Econo...

Send us Fan Mail Homer-based author Tom Kizzia is most well-known for his best-selling 2013 book Pilgrim’s Wilderness , which was chosen by the New York Times as the best true crime book set in Alaska. Kizzia moved to Homer in the mid-70s where he took over the Homer News . In the early 80s, he was hired by the Anchorage Daily News and while working for that paper he wrote a series of stories unde...

Send us Fan Mail Ivy Spohnholz is the Alaska State Director of The Nature Conservancy, which is a global environmental organization and the largest non-profit organization by assets in the Americas. Their mission is to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends. Prior to becoming the Alaska director of the Nature Conservancy, Ivy had served three terms in the Alaska House of Represent...

Send us Fan Mail Representative Alyse Galvin   represents Midtown Anchorage in the Alaska State House, but she is most well known for her two runs for the US House in 2018 and 2020 against long-term Congressman Don Young. Earning 46.7% of the vote, she came closer to defeating him than any other challenger in his 49-year tenure. A third generation Alaska, Alyse's childhood was difficult. So d...

Send us Fan Mail Anchorage Assembly Member George Martinez was raised in Brooklyn, NY, as part of the hip hop community and made a name for himself as a rapper and lyricist at an early age. Growing up in the 80s,he was politicized by the anti-welfare rhetoric of President Reagan’s administration. That experience eventually led him to run for political office, and he was elected as the district lea...

Send us Fan Mail Tiffany Hall was born and raised in Anchorage, and, since 2016, has served as the executive director of Recover Alaska. That organization works across the state to reduce not only excessive alcohol use but also to reduce the harms that come from that excessive alcohol use. Tiffany is sober herself, and we discuss her story and how she ended up as head of Recover Alaska. Mentioned...

Send us Fan Mail Fairbanks Senator Scott Kawasaki was born in Japan to a Japanes-American father and a Chinese-American mother. He moved to Fairbanks halfway through kindergarten and has basically been there ever since. He was elected to the Fairbanks City Council when he was just 22 years old making him the youngest person ever elected to that body; and in 2006 he was elected to the Alaska legisl...

Send us Fan Mail Anchorage politico Anna Hutchinson has for the past few years been a major fundraiser for political campaigns in Anchorage and is now managing campaigns herself. In 2021 she came to Anchorage to work for her college friend Forrest Dunbar’s mayoral campaign. The plan was to be here for just a few months, but she has stayed on to work on other political campaigns. Although we set ou...

Send us Fan Mail Representative Andy Josephson was born and raised here in Anchorage, and although he is the son of former Alaska state Senator and Anchorage Assembly member Joe Josephson, Andy didn’t initially think politics was for him. In 2012, though, he followed in his father’s footsteps getting elected to the Alaska State House where he represented the UMED district until 2022. After the red...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Brett Watson , economist at ISER, was born and raised in a suburb of Houston, Texas. Brett made his way to Anchorage in 2017 as a postdoc at the University of Alaska Anchorage after earning his PhD in Mineral and Energy Economics at the Colorado School of Mines. We discuss how he ended up with his job, and we do a dive into two topics of great interest to many listeners: Alask...

Send us Fan Mail Phyllis Rhodes is the former executive director of Identity, the Anchorage-based nonprofit that seeks to advance Alaska’s LGBTQIA2S+ community. Born in 1937, Ms. Rhodes spent her youth in Amarillo, Texas. She moved to Anchorage in 1964 with her then husband, because she wanted a better future for her daughters. Although she’d known she was a lesbian since childhood, Phyllis was 62...